TO MARIE LOUISE

Poe composed these verses at the request of Mrs. Shew, as the eighteenth line reveals. He rarely used blank verse, and
had written none since “The Coliseum” of 1833 and the unfinished play Politian of 1835, save a few lines inspired by
Elizabeth Barrett in 1845. He used the form in 1847 and 1848 for the present piece, for “To M. L. S——,” and for
the poem “To Helen [Whitman],” but for nothing thereafter. He seems to have concluded that unrhymed verse was not a medium
for which he was gifted, and although he handled it with something more than competence, most of his admirers will not regret his
general avoidance of it.

When Poe prepared the piece for publication he omitted some of the lines, obviously as too personal, but the version he
sent to Mrs. Shew is the more interesting.

The exact date of composition of the piece is somewhat uncertain. In a letter of March 28, 1875, to John H. Ingram,
described in the Ingram List as number 210, Mrs. Houghton wrote somewhat confusedly about this poem and a poem she referred ­[page 406:] to as “To Mrs. M. L. S.” She said that they were
valentines to her, in succeeding years. The poem that follows is surely the later of the two, but as it was published by February 15,
1848, it must have been written considerably before Valentine’s Day of that year. I do not think it possible to be quite sure
whether the personal version or the published one was composed first. But a date in the period between December 1847 and January 1848
may be confidently assigned as that of the poem’s composition.

TEXTS

(A) Manuscript given to Mrs. Shew (the original is now lost, but the text is preserved in a tracing — no. 42 — in
the Ingram Collection at the University of Virginia); (B)Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine for March 1848 (9:138); (C)Works (1850), II, 19.

The manuscript text (A) and the first publication (B) are given in full. In the latter, changes from
the manuscript are found in the title and in lines 8, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17-21 (which are entirely omitted), 24 and 26. Griswold’s
text (C) followed that of the magazine (B) but shortened the title to “To — —,” and introduced a
misprint, “unpurpled,” in line 26.

NOTES [[chiefly for version A]]

1-3 Poe published a story called “The Power of Words” in 1845, but his
reference here is clearly to a passage in “Marginalia,” number 149, published in Graham’s for March 1846:
“I am aware of these ‘fancies’ only when I am upon the very brink of sleep, with the consciousness that I am so
. . . It is as if the five senses were supplanted by five myriad others alien to mortality. Now, so entire is my faith in the
power of words, that, at times, I have believed it possible to embody even the evanescence of fancies such as I have attempted
to describe.”

7-8 The foreign dissyllables are the lady’s personal names, “Marie
Louise,” but these are French, and not “Italian tones,” as in the version Poe published. Frances Winwar (p. 321)
observes that the Italian phrase for “I love you” is two dissyllables, “Io t’amo.”

9-10 This inaccurate quotation from Peele’s David and Bethsabe, lines 46-47,
was used earlier in Politian, IV, 33-34.

12 With reading of versions B and C, compare, in the early “Stanzas,” “Of a thought / The unembodied essence,” and several passages in Eureka: “That class of terms . . . representing thoughts
of thought . . . These ideas — conceptions such as these — unthoughtlike thoughts — soul-reveries
rather than conclusions or even considerations of the intellect . . . That merest of words, ‘Infinity’
. . . is by no means the expression of an idea — but an effort at one.”

16 In printed versions, B and C, compare the first line of
Shakespeare’s epilogue to The Tempest: “Now my charms are all o’erthrown.”

26-28 Fred Lewis Pattee (Side-Lights on American Literature, New York, 1922, p.
334) cited these lines as indication that “Ulalume” referred to Mrs. Shew. But compare the passage in “Ligeia”:
“With how vast a triumph . . . did I feel . . . in studies but little sought . . . that
delicious vista by slow degrees expanding before me, down whose long, gorgeous, and all untrodden ­[page 409:] path, I might at length pass onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely precious not to be
forbidden.”

31 The reading “clouds of glory” is from Wordsworth’s ode
“Intimations of Immortality.” There is plenty of evidence that Poe admired much of Wordsworth’s poetry. Wilbur
(Poe, p. 148) compares to this line (in B and C) “The Domain of
Arnheim,” where Ellison’s bride’s “loveliness and love enveloped his existence in the purple atmosphere of
paradise.”